This is, by the way,
a poem. Perhaps you need
to be told. I approach
these scraps with some
trepidation, natural,
under the circumstances.
I hope to be comprehensible
and to avoid unnecessary
obliquity. Yet I feel,
today, again, an inexplicable
longing to be oblique.

                                    Outside
in. This question—
have outside-art practices
moved inside?—puts me
in an uncomfortably elegiac
position. I feel called
upon to deplore the
inexorable migration
of outsider practices
inside. Perhaps I’m
supposed to shrug
my shoulders, buck
up, find wily ways of
building a new outside,
quick, before it migrates
back inside. Problem: I’m
not adept at recognizing
whether an event or artifact
is taking place outside
or inside. This non-
adeptness isn’t a result
of some extraterrestrial
handicap on my part—
it’s simply a matter
of how much time I spend
alone, navigating my

own thoughts, constituted
by nothingness and empti-
ness, a salutary and chosen
auto-evisceration. (My
favorite new concept is
autophagia, which I plan
to practice frequently.)
The moment when an
artifact or performance
might be said to be occurring
“inside”—this interlude lasts
only so long—and before
you know it, that interval
has passed, and the issue
(painting, poem, song, shoe,
explosion, neighborhood,
scene, dance, food, novel,
film, concept, scrap) has
moved elsewhere, into
oblivion, where most
experiences dwell; into
oblivion will go any-
thing we consider an
“inside” practice, and this
oblivion—peaceful, Elysian,
like a rare-book library that
no one visits—always ac-
cepts admittees to its fold.

We might agree to call
a place, and a taste, an
“inside” only because
at some time this taste
makes money, or turns
objects into money, or puts
those objects in a push-me-
pull-you relation to money.
By “inside,” I mean not

merely that someone
is paying attention to
the taste these scraps
represent but that this
taste, this attentiveness,
concretely translates into
commerce, the system
of recognitions and mirror
scenes that forms the
horizon of a culture’s
transparency to itself.
I am I because my
little dog knows me,
said Gertrude Stein,
and a microculture is
a microculture because
its little scraps of paper
know they could be
currency.

                  I may be wrong.
To remedy the error,
I will change the subject.
I will put forward a
general axiom, and then
I might give an example.
(Axioms don’t require
buttressing or proof.
I thrive on axioms—
their falseness, their
shimmering technique
of being both right and
wrong, like sharkskin,
or like the difficulty
of telling blue and green
apart in underlit rooms.)
Axiom: There exists
a third space, apart

from “outside” and
“inside,” a zone that
D. W. Winnicott called
play, that Kant, defining
art, called purposiveness
without purpose, that I
call the inn of last resort,
or the playground of no
prisoners, or the detail
that engenders fantasy,
or shimmering, unfix-
able liminality, or mind
your own business, or
I can’t explain it, but I
see it. Here we spend
our finest though un-
remembered moments:
the realm of Winnicott’s
relaxed undirected men-
tal inconsequence, of
half paying attention—
the zone where something
momentarily matters, we
can’t say why, we can’t
defend its mattering, and by
the time we’ve noticed that
it matters, this shade of
meaning has jettisoned
comprehensibility. This
zone of interiority is where,
in split-second instants
of ratification and decisive-
ness, meanings get made
and then abandoned. I’m
inching, I suppose, toward
a specific example. Interior-
ity, as Emily Dickinson
put is, is where the meanings

are, but she put a comma be-
tween the words meanings
and are, because she wanted
to mark, as with a scar or
a rip, the moment before
meaning enters the “inside”
of comprehensibility; she
wanted to play around with
the pause, the necessary,
dumbfounded hesitation,
the scrap of an instant in
which the are—Being—
hasn’t yet happened, is
still on hold, waiting.

I’m dying of impatience.
I’ve made clear some
of my debts. I’ve told
you that I’m interested
in tiny, near-invisible
navigations of attentive-
ness and inattentiveness,
rather than in the cultural
location where the objects
to which we pay or do
not pay attention
purportedly dwell.
I am not interested
in the identity tags on
the merchandise. I
am interested in what
I see in the merchandise,
and I am most eager
to approach objects
considered unmerchan-
disable, off-the-market—
a taste I share with some
of you. I care less about

who made the shoe than
about the grime I notice
on its heel.

                    On an on-
line auction site, iGavel,
I found, recently, remnants
of the estate of the late
opera soprano Anna Moffo,
to whom I have devoted
many words, in the past,
and many hours of
purposeless, un-
directed meditation,
a process of perseveration
not based in drives
or instincts, but in the
going-nowhere zone of
play: non-erotogenic,
non-climactic, spaced-
out. The item that most
caught my eye, though I
did not bid on it, was a pair
of her Ferragamo pumps,
on sale for a modest price.
A set of four pairs
of nearly identical pumps
was offered at a starting
bid of $80. What arrested
me was the photo, posted
on iGavel, of one pump’s
sole—ostensibly shown to us,
on the site, to authenticate
the pump’s identity
(Ferragamo). And yet
possible purchasers
did not care whether
the shoes were Ferragamo.

The point of putting
the pumps up for sale
was that Anna Moffo once
wore them. That’s why
we were shown one shoe’s
mildly gravel- and
dirt-stained underside.
Call it scuffed. It was a pump
enduring an intermediate
position on the spectrum
between pristinely new
and worn-to-the-bone.
The pump was on its way to
oblivion, but someone pressed
the pause button: The pump
stood, arrested, between use
and uselessness. The fact
that I noticed dirt and scuffmarks
on the bottom of her pump
may have symbolic meaning.
We might file this fact
within the fetishism
dossier, or we might file
it under abjection, a folder
already overstuffed. We
might file it under maso-
chism, or sadism. Or under
objet petit a. Certainly
the scuffmarks are an objet
petit a, an impermissible
and accidental springboard
for desire, a catalyst that is
at the same time desire’s
castoff, its scuzzy remnant.
The pump seems to have
a cultural location—opera,
fandom, auctions, fashion,
cultural detritus, nostalgia,

mourning, collecting—and
yet none of these sites can
explain the scuffmarks. No
system can claim my
attention to these stains.
My captivation cannot
be sold. Nor can it be placed
inside or outside; it exists in
neither zone. It is simply
a fleck of dust, of outcast
flotsam, that need interest
no one. If I were a visual
artist, I would make a C-print
of iGavel’s doubtless copy-
righted photo of the pump’s
underside. I would buy
the pumps and place them
on a plinth in the center of
a gallery. I would hang
a juicy C-print of the sole on
one wall. On another
wall, I would place this text.
But I am not a visual
artist, and I am not depositing
my attentiveness to the scuff-
marks in any destination
that can be visited, except
(here I am behaving like
a hypocrite) these words.
I needn’t insist that these
words are inside or
outside.

              Push the button
in front of you. Don’t ask
anyone else’s opinion about
whether it is the right
button to push. If you are

captivated, push it.

One final example, one last
button. A year or more
ago, the detectives who keep
the nation busy thought they’d
found the man who murdered
the juvenile beauty queen
JonBenet Ramsey. But they
got the wrong man. He
turned out not to be the
killer. Before authorities
discovered his innocence,
newspapers printed photo-
graphs of him, and in some
of those photographs, or
at least one, I noticed a spot
of shine on his forehead:
sweat, or the stigmata
of a fatty diet, or the un-
flattering reflection of press
flashbulbs. I remember
thinking, when I saw this
photograph, that my attentive-
ness to his forehead’s shine
was not part of the story’s
allegorical and juridical trappings;
the forehead’s shine was
a decision I had made,
a private instant of curatorial
whimsy. I had singled
out this shine and would do
nothing with it. It would
undergo no transformation
into art or story; I would not
mention it to anyone.
I would not even read
the newspaper story

accompanying the photo.
I would file that shine
in the dossier tentatively
called reprieves from
certainty. I would file
that shine under ellipses,
vacancies, objets petit a,
random stains, scuffmarks
of no particular value or
meaning. I would file
it here, and leave its
interpretation up to you.

Images from UbuWeb's Outsiders.